


Alignment: Chaotic Dumbass

by WeOffendedShadows



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Adulting sucks, All Hail Queen Michelle Jones, BAMF Michelle Jones, Brief mention of sexual assault, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I am not kind to Peter Parker, Identity Reveal, Inhumane medical care, Irondad, Medical Inaccuracies, Mistaken identities, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Spider-Man: Homecoming, Precious Peter Parker, Violence against teenagers, because reasons, but i won't hang out there too long, let's bring in the x-men (first class versions), missing tags, no beta we post like adults, recovery fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-14 04:44:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20594927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeOffendedShadows/pseuds/WeOffendedShadows
Summary: “A ghost,” Peter said, and his words left his head before he could even collect them, “you know, like it was something that once was there but isn’t, but it still has a presence that can’t be ignored. It’s like that. I can remember that I thought something, but I can’t remember exactly what that thought was and why I was thinking it. I’m just left with this vague haunting that is hanging around telling me I’m missing something.*(*(*(*Wherein Peter Parker is forced to deal with the many consequences of others' actions, often to his own pain. Sometimes, he has to realize that he can't handle it all by  himself. Course, that damn dumbass energy prevents him, but with friends, family, and something in between, he might find what he needs.If he just stops getting kidnapped.*Inspired by Blunt Force Trauma by Azure_K_Mello





	Alignment: Chaotic Dumbass

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Saving the World Does Not a Hero Make](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13835934) by [Azure_K_Mello](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azure_K_Mello/pseuds/Azure_K_Mello). 

> So after burning through Blunt Force Trauma(Series) by Azure_K_Mello, I had a great need. This is what came from it. I started with a similar start as theirs, but hopefully I'll be veering off into uncharted territory.
> 
> Stories need more Michelle Jones. i'm just saying the Queen doesn't get enough love from MCU, so we'll have to do it. 
> 
> Please read and review, and thank you everyone. I hope you enjoy.

Concrete is hard. Solid. Brutally so. Not that it doesn’t shatter under heavy weight, but the fact that it shatters doesn’t really mean anything when colliding with it.

Peter Parker knew this from experience, not that he wanted to have to experience it again and again, but sometimes the ground flew up quicker than even he could react. 

Like now. 

He landed with a solid thump, a little bounce that did nothing to lessen his landing, and spat out blood with the air exiting his body. Black filled his eyes, and slowly, as he blinked away and sucked in breathe after empty breathe, he could see again.

Four figures approached directly in front of him; the ringing of broken concrete behind said the fifth had joined them from his perch. A perch that previously Peter crouched on after escaping a grapple with one of them. His spidey-sense didn’t alert him to man until he landed. Not enough time to dodge the hand reaching out of his neck. Not enough time to break the hold and stop the throwing of his body. 

Peter coughed and tried to push up, to continue to fight, to flee, to do anything. He spat out blood again and touched his teeth, a few loose, as he attempted to get up. But his arms gave out and he fell into a heap of Peter Parker parts barely held together by pain and ligaments. 

The four didn’t move any closer, the fifth shuffled step by thunderous step.

Get up, he told himself. Get up. Get up. Get up. Getupgetupgetupgetupgetup-

With his stubborn cadence, Peter tried again, ignoring the ringing in his ears, the sharp pain in his wrist, the pressure on his chest. He wanted to ignore threat in front and the threat behind. He wanted to be up in the air, swinging away with a simple thwip and be free. 

Five clomped about ten feet behind him, and Peter felt the air shutter in the movement a breath before the snail’s pace increased with the ground cracking behind him. 

He got a foot underneath him and shoved away, twisting in the air, as Five barreled past him, trampling the ground where he lied moments before. Bits of rubble flew up with him as he stretched out with his hand, ready to fling a webline away and-

The world lit white.

The world lit white, and all Peter could feel was his leg, his shin, shattering under the force of a thrown vibranium disc ricocheting off of him. 

The world lit white, and Peter fell with a thud and curled up best he could around the sharp pain of his ribs and stomach, reaching for his leg. He could see where he was hit: bone poking through the jeans leg around a neat and simple horizontal line. The only thing holding his foot to his knew was the muscle between it. His tibula and fibula were shattered and the leg bent at an unnatural angle.

Pain. he had become pain. A fiery ripple across nerve endings that healed faster than they could fray. Ribs that pinched too hard, a wrist that just hung its hand with no support, a leg that wasn’t a leg any more but a mass of broken calcium and other minerals wrapped in meat. The nerve endings fired up and down, calling to him and dragging his attention in so many directions.

It was a moment of infinite nothingness filled with only that pain. Peter blinked and somehow, there were six of the group. Six people, five men and one woman, stood around him, glaring down at him if he were to guess since moving hurt too much. 

Six people he had known for a short time, but he thought he could, was told he could trust. SIx people who bore the title of super-hero, won the praise of the world despite their anger for their selfless acts of heroism. 

The Rogue Avengers stood over him: Captain America, Falcon, Winter Soldier, Scarlet Witch, Vision, and the Hulk. He could only see their boots, but before, as they attacked and beat him, broken him, Peter saw each of them, felt each of their uninhibited assaults meant to hurt instead of subdue. 

Another time, probably if he was whole, he would have asked why. But at the moment, his mouth was dry and he struggled to breathe. Talking was impossible. As was pleading or begging. 

The Scarlet Witch stepped forward, closer to him. He should swing out, attack her, fight her, except his body just couldn’t move any more than shiver in pain. It could defend himself even as she moved closer and closer, right next to him, even as she bent down and grabbed his neck, even as something erupted through the agony of his shattered body. Something stark clean and calming. Peter gasped in a breath.

He smelled ozone, heavy and cumbersome, as they all stood around him. His vision flickered, the colors of their boots shifting the bright light. He fought against the current pulling him, tugging him away from the moment as a set of boots stepped back, but they looked strange. Red lines then black blocks. Red then black. Red then black. 

Then, just black.

*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(

The Raft is a terrible name, Peter decided. It implied being small and open and yellow. It implied being out in the ocean with nothing around except the sky and the water. Or dangerous rapids. That was an option too, he figured.

What Peter got, he found when he woke up, was stark grey walls, a solid beam of metal bed with no pillow or blanket, a tiny window that let in barely any light.

He performed the standard Peter Parker check, patent pending, on himself, and if he wasn’t already grimacing due the pain, he would have from what he found: nothing good. Not that he was surprised.

Breathing hurt. Not broken rib hurt, but damn was it close. He didn’t dare open his eyes as he could feel as the world pulsed around and around inside his skull and shifted beneath his back. The room was thankfully dark and cold, which should help with the heavy throb behind his eyes, in his skull, all over his head really. His nose must have been broken at some point, flattened perhaps, as he could barely breathe out of it. The cold chapped his lips, dried out his mouth with every gasping mouthful of air. 

Things grew worse as he moved down from his head.

His chest burned as he tried to breath as regularly and evenly as possible. He grazed his fingers against his ribs, just enough to send tendrils of pain through him. Bruised at best, and he hoped it was the best. If he could stomach it(ha!), he would have sat up to look at his body, but the way his stomach pulled when he shifted told him it might have just been one giant bruise and internal bleeding. His wrist ached, but a general ache of sprain not broken, not like his leg. 

He was glad he couldn’t open his eyes yet, couldn’t see if he could because of the dark, and couldn’t bend at the waist. He was glad of so many obstacles blocking him from seeing the horror he felt on his right leg. 

His shin burned, and he could barely move his right leg without a sharp and constant stab, felt worse than that knife last week, echoing up his spine and arching his back. Leaving him to move his leg again. Fun cycle that one. 

“So,” Peter mumbled, “you find yourself broken and beaten, trapped in a meat locker, what do you do?”

As a child of gen z, he was not prepared for the catastrophic experience of kidnapping. The previous thoughts on the matter didn’t offer the best advice (really the buddy system just led to two kids getting taken), and the only one that he could think of wouldn’t work. He didn’t have a sterling silver money clip with fifty bucks in it. 

He didn’t even have fifty bucks. 

Light flared behind his eyelids and the massive pulse within his mind settled on some section that decided puking was the right choice.

Peter leaned over best he could and threw up the content in his stomach, which was probably just bile. “And blood, apparently,” he said, spitting out the horrid taste. He stared through a blurry haze at the small puddle of mess, red and brown overlapping each other. 

Wonderful, just wonderful.

So many problems, so much pain, so many distractions.

Best start with the first and foremost of what he could handle and possible fix. 

It would require him to be stupid, really stupid. But MJ said he was good at being stupid, so maybe he’d be alright.

*(*(*(*(*

Michelle Jones stomped across the foyer of Stark Tower, NYC, in full view of the employees, tourists, and random other people she didn’t have time to identify and classify. Ned Leeds followed her a good twenty steps behind. Not that he wanted to be there, but his stuttering and uncertainty wasn’t going to fix this catastrophe that started two days ago.

Two days ago, her boyfriend humiliated her in front of her team by asking her to prom.

Two days ago, her best friend ran out of the room he had just entered. 

Two days ago, Peter Parker was dumbass doing dumbass things and got his dumb ass kidnapped.

The fact that it’d been two days and no one had said anything was disturbing; forty-eights was beyond the time a kid was meant to be missing before reported, and try as he might, Parker was still seventeen, a kid. Like her. 

And he was missing. 

She had called May before twenty-four hours had past (hour twelve, minute twenty-one: he hadn’t been returning her texts). May said he never came home. Worry grew in her voice as they briefly talked.

Between the first phone call to May and school the next day, Michelle scanned every news source for New York and found no mention of the local hero her dumbass friend like to pretend to hide from her. She avoided her boyfriend and having to give him an answer. She cornered Leeds and demanded them. The terrified boy had nothing to give her. He was lost as she was. 

No one else seemed to notice Parker missing.

Seven hours and thirty seven minutes between the start of school and when it let out. Seven hours and thirty seven minutes where her thoughts refused to settle on anything other than her missing best friend. Seven hours and thirty seven minutes without any information to confirm or deny the kidnapping of him (got caught looking at her phone in second, was confiscated and returned at the end of the day). The entire time, no one mentioned or referred to Peter Parker.

Michelle still hadn’t decided which she hated more.

When school let out, after she cancelled practice and ran home. she scoured the global sources looking for any mention of Tony Stark and some dumb ass thing that the rich white bastard liked to call world-saving to find mention of the red and blue bug-boy. 

Nothing. 

She called Leeds (hour thirty-one, minute forty-nine). 

Nothing.

She called May again (hour thirty-one, minute fifty-three).

Nothing.

So many possibilities. So many methods and means that she knew of, which meant half could have been implemented. Not that she planned the kidnapping of a fellow student, or at least the implementation of it, but it was useful information and passed the time. 

It was luck that an email popped at that time. One regarding a question related to an investigation dealing with an incident in the loading bay for the school.

It was luck that she had placed a camera there, pointed in the direction of the parking lot, all in the name of investigative journalism.

It was luck that Peter dumbass Parker had been caught on camera.

But it wasn’t luck that she had to watch him defend himself against the Rogue Avengers. 

Michelle Jones didn't pause the video after she downloaded it and scanned for him. Not when she found Peter sneaking out the loading bay. Not when the Rogue Avengers attacked in tandem, with a ferocity and specificity she didn’t realize was possible.

Six on one. Six highly trained people (well, three highly trained and three horrifically powered individuals) against a high school student. 

Peter Parker was a brave idiot known for putting himself in front of punches to as a means of stopping them. Just so happened this method didn’t work.

At roughly hour forty-five, she finally moved. She left her house and ran to May’s, clutching her laptop the entire way. Twenty blocks. Would have smarter to call an Uber or subway or whatever. 

She held May while she watched her boy brutally assaulted and carried off screen. She held her afterwards when she cried herself out of hysteria and into unconsciousness. 

And now? At hour forty nine, minute seven, Michelle Jones entered Stark Tower with her laptop in her arms a shield against every. Ned Leeds followed a safe distance away.

“Can I help you?” the attendant at the front desk said, a plastic smile on his perfectly clean face. 

“Let’s skip the boring parts,” Michelle said and stepped up the desk.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m going to demand to see Stark. You’re going to humor me and ask why. I’m going to say it's important and its specifically for him. You’re going to refuse, probably laugh at the same time, and tell me to move on. This is going to go on for a while and I’d appreciate it if we could just skip it and you let us through.”

The attendant started at her. “That’s not going to happen.”

“Then I’m going tell you, very loudly with crocodile tears and sobs that echo, a story about a woman who found herself in the hotel with a rich and smart man, a man at the top of his field and his company, about eighteen years ago. In this story, you’d learn that the woman had no desire to be there, certainly no desire for the man, but nevertheless she found herself in a situation she could not remove herself. Seven months and change later, she gave birth to bi-racial girl whom she loved dearly and deeply until she died ten years later to cancer.”

“I-”

“It's a fascinating story, Edgar,” she read his name tag, “one that I could go into great detail and I’m certain the mass of people behind me would love to hear how I name of the man who I believed raped my mother.”

“That’s not-”

“Loudly. Very loudly. With snotty and disgusting tears that ruin makeup but look amazing on news shows because of the added realism and drama,” Michelle said. She cocked her head and stared at him. “So let's start at the end of that where you go tell Stark two friends of his intern want to talk him immediately. And tell him the only reason why a very angry aunt isn’t here is because I didn’t want to make a scene. ”

Edgar the attendant didn’t move.

“I don’t want to make a scene,” she continued, then looked down. When she looked back up at him, he gasped at the tears she forced. “But I am damn willing to. Get me to him now.” 

Edgar the attendant didn’t move.

Michelle turned and opened her mouth wide, only to stop the words at the back of her throat as Edgar scurried off, not bothering to watch him run away.

Leeds stepped up to her, slightly out of breath. “What was that?”

“I can’t abide people wasting my time.”

“What about us?” he said and gave her a soft incomplete smile.

“I can't abide other people wasting my time.” She didn’t feel like smiling as much as the comment should have at least gotten a smirk and a friendly insult. 

Two minutes later, they were escorted to an elevator where they were taken up forty-seven floors to a massive open room where three people waited for them. She could only see Tony Stark glaring at her from a seated position, hands tented and back stiff.

MIchelle stepped forward ready to confront the man, to share everything she had found safe in the laptop in her arms, when the other men turned around. She stopped fast enough that Leeds walked into her and nearly knocked her over.

The first man was Colonel James Rhodes, War Machine. A supporter of the Accords, as a member of the United States Air Force.

The second being was Vision, an android. 

The second being was on the video she couldn’t stop seeing whenever she closed her eyes.

Colonel Rhodes stepped towards her. She didn’t move. Vision stepped towards her, she took one back. The exits weren’t readily available, but did they matter with a being that could phase through the walls? 

“MJ?” Leeds said. He didn’t touch her, but she could feel his presence right behind her. “What’s-”

He hadn’t watched the video. He didn’t see the… the… Michelle swallowed nothing and took another step back as Vision continued to approach them. 

Colonel Rhodes stopped. He held out a hand to stop Vision.

Breath. Just breath. They wouldn’t dare do anything here, not after she nearly made a scene. Even if Stark had complete control over the building. There’d be nothing of them.

This was a terrible idea. A really bad and horrible.

“Miss Jones?” Vision said.

She stared at them. 

“You know them?” Colonel Rhodes asked.

“Ms. Michelle Jones and Mr. Edward Leeds, friends of one Mr. Peter Parker,” Vision replied. Their voice sounded so rich and despite the metallic timbre of it. 

“And what does that have to do with-”

“Your intern has been missing for forty-eight hours,” Michelle said. She swallowed nothing again and closed her eyes. She tightened her grip on her laptop only to relax it with a slow exhale. 

Stark finally moved. He pushed himself up out of the chair and practically stumbled toward them. He looked haggard, beaten and lost. “What do you know about-”

“Spider-man?” Michelle asked. “Yes we know, no its not important at this time, you need to catch up.” She didn’t look at Vision as she flipped out her laptop and let the screen load.

“How did-”

“Peter Parker left school forty eight hours ago,” Michelle said. “He left out the back loading bay. Watch.”

She turned the computer around as the video started to play. She didn’t turn the sound on.

No one moved as they watched, even though Rhodes, Vision, and Stark were a good ten feet away. Ned moved around her to watch. Twenty three minutes and forty-one seconds of video. Peter Parker being violently assaulted by six people whom should have been protecting people like him.

No one spoke.

Her cheeks felt wet and she wanted clean them, but she held the laptop out for them to watch. 

She locked her knees and stared straight forward. 

She ignored the faces of the other people in the room.

Even as the world felt much lighter and fuzzier than it should. Even they all stopped watching the video and looked directly at her. Falling to the floor. 

(*(*(*(*(

Peter Parker wasn’t alright. Far from it, he decided. 

He collapsed back to the cold metal board that acted as his bed, sweating through his thin science shirt (“If Iron Man teamed up with someone named Silver Surfer, they’d be alloys”) and flannel overshirt. Moving, even a la few feet to the door and back took too much from him. Might have been the sheer amount of agony he topped the rest of his broken body before.

Leaving his leg alone made no sense, so with the intelligence God gifted him and the dumbass energy he won fair and square, Peter did something about the only injury he could do anything. He tore his pants leg to free up the broken shin, shoved both bones in a close-to-original spot (while biting down on his belt and screaming, alot), then used his belt and the soles of his shoes to create a makeshift splint. 

Peter screamed as he squeezed the splint into place, puked a second time, then passed out afterwards, which was probably for the better, and woke up in darkness. His captors removed his sick and left a small tray right by the door. Couldn’t see what exactly but the lack of a smell meant nothing fresh.

Fuckers. 

Despite the shitty job, the splint held. Helped that he didn’t put any weight on it, clinging to the wall when he hobbled over to get the tray. But it held his leg together, the pressure relieving just a fraction of the pain. 

Or he was delirious. He hadn’t decided. 

Someone should tell him soon. He leaned to the left slightly, and looked at the tray he carried over and dropped next to the bench. A pack of m&ms, a granola bar, and short bottle of water.

Peter leaned back and tried to squeeze the tears back. Tried. Hard. Scrunched his face up and snapped his eyes closed and hid behind his arm. 

This sucked. Like worse than gym. Or the collapse of that building. Maybe not that. 

(But he did get himself out of there. Without any help. Here? Not so much) 

Did anyone know he was here? Well, someone did. The Rogue Avengers attacked him, beat him horribly. This place, this cold and dark place that threatened to consume him. 

Nope. Cold and bright place. Fuckers turned on the light. His response was to curse them. Sadly, that was only in his head as his body decided to puke again. 

“Temperature’s about right, though, for the open sea this time of year,” he said as he rolled back in place. He hid his eyes with his right arm from the bright lights blaring down at him. “Not that I’ve experienced the open sea. Or a lake larger than … something. A lake like… umm…” The word escaped him. It had been replaced by a bolt of agony shooting up his leg. 

Peter clenched his jaw at it. Keep talking, he told himself, just keep talking. Whatever you can think, just let it escape from your lips. Anything. Just keep talking. 

“Anyways, I had asked if we could go one year, you know, for fun, which my uncle always said no. there were other ways to have fun than staring at nothing, doing nothing, just, ya know, nothing. And I was like, yeah I want to do that, though I didn’t agree with the nothing part, even though he always acted like there was nothing out on the ocean or the sea or whatever large body of water. But Jake, I talked about Jake before didn’t I, but Jake always went away for the summer on his dad’s yacht, which is a really strange word given how its spelled, I bet one of my friends knows why it's spelled that way, Jake always went away for the summer on his dad’s yacht with his family for a fishing trip, and he talked and talked and talked and talked and talked all fall about this trip and how many fish they got and what they did out in the ocean and I was like, so stunned that-”

Footsteps outside his cell. Peter didn’t move, not even to continue his rambling insanity to alleviate the boredom of nothing in the small useless way he could. He stilled his aching ribs and let a breathe die on his lips. 

But the footsteps simply walked by. Didn’t even slow down.

First time he actually heard anyone, which was strange.

Peter couldn’t tell how long he’d been stuck in the small cell, freezing to the metal. He wasn’t shivering, but that didn’t mean anything. Four cycles of light and dark, only two visits of food, which wasn’t enough for him to survive. The room had a urinal, which was nice, except it was across the room. Not that he needed it often. Once thus far.

First light cycle, he screamed and begged and pleaded. He wanted answers, deserved them really, but he never got any. All he heard was the echo of his own voice if he yelled loud enough, the click of the lights on and off, and the rumble of a heavy duty air conditioner running on artic. 

Wonder if May is alright, he thought as his brains pulsed at nascar speeds in his head. It hasn’t been long enough for her to worry, has it? No one else would be looking for me, especially if it's only been a day.

“At most,” he mumbled. As if saying it outloud made it true and real. “At most.” 

The air conditioning unit kicked on again. He didn’t shiver.

He tried to focus on May, and the fact that while he didn’t want her to worry, she probably was and her worry was worse than anyone he knew. But the words tumbled a bit, and he lost three trains of thoughts and was left the knowledge he should know something or had felt something, except he couldn’t remember what that something was. 

“A ghost,” Peter said, and his words left his head before he could even collect them, “you know, like it was something that once was there but isn’t, but it still has a presence that can’t be ignored. It’s like that. I can remember that I thought something, but I can’t remember exactly what that thought was and why I was thinking it. I’m just left with this vague haunting that is hanging around telling me I’m missing something. Entirely possible, one of my best friends like to remind me, ad nauseum, of just how oblivious I am, but clearly you knew that, what with how easily you guys jumped on me, a seventeen year old student. I’m not complain, well, yes, I am but-”

The door to the cell slide open.

Peter lifted his arm and turned his head slightly to see Captain Steve Rogers, Captain America, standing in the doorway. Only a thick clear plastic separated them, holes sliced into it so sound could easily pass between outside and inside without the inside ever really touching the outside. 

Except he stood so strangely. Over a year later, he could still picture the man he fought in Germany, his shape and movement. He had a distinctive way of running and walking, a way of holding himself as he talked. Now he was too relaxed, almost arrogantly so.

The shape was right. Through the bright light, he could tell that much, but stance didn’t fit his frame or his supposed purpose.

“Mr. Parker,” Captain America said in a tone that Peter knew would give no quarter or mercy, “You’re doing well.”


End file.
